aid briefly in explanation.

When it was all done the boys turned in, but not to sleep. It was long
past midnight before the deep and regular breathing from the beds
proclaimed that the last had succumbed.

The early dawn was tinging the frosty window panes with red when from
the Kid's cot there came a shriek that roused the house with a start
of very genuine surprise.

"Hello!" shouted Stretch, sitting up with a jerk and rubbing his eyes.
"Yes, sir! in a minute. Hello, Kid, what to--"

The Kid was standing barefooted in the passageway, with a base-ball
bat in one hand and a trumpet and a pair of drumsticks in the other,
viewing with shining eyes the wagon and its cargo, the gun and all the
rest. From every cot necks were stretched, and grinning faces watched
the show. In the excess of his joy the Kid let out a blast on the
trumpet that fairly shook the building. As if it were a signal, the
boys jumped out of bed and danced a breakdown about him in their
shirt-tails, even Gimpy joining in.

"Holy Moses!" said Stretch, looking down, "if Santy Claus ain't been
here an' forgot his hull kit, I'm blamed!"

THE SLIPPER-MAKER'S FAST

Isaac Josephs, slipper-maker, sat up on the fifth floor of his Allen
Street tenement, in the gray of the morning, to finish the task he had
set himself before Yom Kippur. Three days and three nights he had
worked without sleep, almost without taking time to eat, to make ready
the two dozen slippers that were to enable him to fast the fourth day
and night for conscience' sake, and now they were nearly done. As he
saw the end of his task near, he worked faster and faster while the
tenement slept.

Three years he had slaved for the sweater, stinted and starved
himself, before he had saved enough to send for his wife and children,
awaiting his summons in the city by the Black Sea. Since they came
they had slaved and starved together; for wages had become steadily
less, work more grinding, and hours longer and later. Still, of that
he thought little. They had known little else, there or here; they
were together now. The past was dead; the future was their own, even
in the Allen Street tenement, toiling night and day at starvation
wages. To-morrow was the feast, their first Yom Kippur since they had
come together again,--Esther, his wife, and Ruth and little Ben,--the
feast when, priest and patriarch of his own house, he might forget his
bondage and be free. Poor little Ben! The hand t